What would happen if you mix two master architects with opposing styles?... ...as a very real and indeed interactive architectural novel where characters come in and out of the "narrative" both expectedly and unexpectedly, and the "story" meanders like one of those great rivers that sometimes overflows and floods and sometimes runs dry while raindrops are eagerly awaited.

"Nolli made no attempt to rectify inconsistencies of the Bufalini map when he prepared the reduced copy."

Piranesi's resultant redrawn plans suggest a methodology whereby the fragmentary plans of Bufalini were used as kernels of ancient fact that, in turn, galvanized newly interpreted redrawings of what once was.

In rereading 2666, while reading "The Part About the Critics" I thought, "Here we have a novel about the search for an author." The love was in the search as well, and the handicap was mostly avoided until the end (of that part). Then the next part begins with making fictitious love to a poet headed for insanity.

Perhaps all this is making its way into the 'novel' whose work is just beginning now.

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2013.10.03 12:51
"The contrasting movements, outwards and inward, are easier to detect because of the external structure, but in themselves they are formal rather than structural principles of order because they work upward from specific characters and events. In this loose sense, form is inductive, working from the particular to the general, while structure is deductive, starting with a generalization or a pattern and fitting details into it.
In practice, form and structure are not mutually exclusive. . . .By creating unstable and progressive oppositions, he [Waugh] establishes a pattern in which characters compliment, contradict, and qualify one another, and he creates a form in which the process of incorporating experience and reconciling then and now, there and here, is more important than any mere succession of events.
Of course novelists can impose structure only upon material that they have formulated or are in the process of formulating. Decisions about structure, form, development, style, character, plot, and point of view take place in rapid succession if not simultaneously; each choice precludes or influences a number of other choices; and no decision can be final until the whole structure is complete."
--Robert Murray Davis